so far I’ve tried binary, trinary, octal, hexadecimal with no results that make sense. Even checked to see if the letters they converted into was a cipher and did not find anything. Of course I still have not checked for internal break downs into nibbles, bytes, etc. But that is probably going too far.

I guess it is noise to Dietzel. Dietzel can understand some language(apparently enough to understand the automated pizza-ordering-service 😆 ), but if Monica gets really audio-techy, he’ll hear…..noise, white noise to be precise…

A tube is what was used before transistors. Glass container with electric components inside to amplify or alter the signal passing through them. Just big, use a lot of energy, and burn our a lot faster than transistors. lol.

Good article. I knew little about tubes before this. I know a great deal more now. Even what a magic eye is and how they worked. They are also an excellent example of incremental design and the ingenuity of people. Integrated circuit devices even more so. The 256 bit digital storage tube I ran across in the process was amazing.

I am *just* old enough to remember the tube-testing consoles that used to be in grocery stores, hardware stores, drugstores and the like. If something was wrong with your TV, radio or “hi fi set,” you pulled the tubes, took them to the store and stuck them into the appropriate sockets on the console. If the console’s “OK” lamp lit, you knew that tube wasn’t bad and tested the next one. There was a shelf full of tubes in boxes, same as with buying lightbulbs today.

For high power and specialty applications, like Radar, Microwaves, and X-Rays, tubes are still the best way to go due to the heat involved. Even communications satellites use Traveling Wave Tubes for their signals because they’re small. efficient, and durable.

And, of course, there’s the Good Old Television Tube (before flat screens), the Cathode Ray Tube!

Even Fluorescent lamps count as a type of Vacuum Tube because they use the electrons released by the filament to make the phosphors glow. And yes, the lamps are sensitive to electronic emissions — Fluorescent lamps will glow by themselves near strong electrical or radio activity, such as in or near radio transmitters and antennae!

I knew someone would do all that work for me. Zachanriha gets the brass ring for trying as many options as he did, the lack of quinary and duodecimal notwithstanding. If there’s a hidden joke in there, I’m missing it.

Hmm…
My grandfather worked for RCA- when he moved out of his house a few years ago, I took boxes and boxes of tubes he had, and all kinds of old test equipment. But I don’t have anything that uses tubes. I bet they were for his old 1932 standup AM radio. But my uncle took that…

Oh, I take that back. I have an oscilloscope he built himself in the late 40’s, using a military surplus radar screen off a B-52… It has a huge tube power supply. Still works great, but he never labled the dials, so I have a hell of a time using it! Takes like 5min to warm up and you could fry bacon over the power supply!

I once sold off a whole 105MM howitzer box full of old-but-still-functional tubes left by my father, and realized a good return from them, too–several hundred bucks, more than enough to pay the income tax on his estate that year . . . .

Don’t sell them as a grab bag, though. Group them by number, and you get a better return. If you got any of the real oldies like 42s and 45s, you can see some nice money.

And then what tests bad, you sell as a grab bag for somebody to make a avant-garde art installation.

>That number is binary for 4,893,317. Which doesn’t >make much sense either. Unless I misstranscribed?
-stjason
“Digital signals and frequency correction in a digital wireless system
United States Patent 4893317”

I get the feeling from the look in the last panel, Monica is basicly say … “Can You Hear Me Now?”

Like how the old digital data storage worked, where are the start bits and stop bits?
and I like to know where number 4,893,317 comes from – if you take the sequence as one number it equals about 2.97065487540229e+89 (a decimal number with 90 digits)

when i tried to convert it myself, i figured it out. most binary to decimal converters only take the first 16 bits or so because the algorithm they use for conversion can only handle that much. you would have to dig really deep to find a decent one.

I have a decent ear (despite all too many Very Loud small venue rock nights), and about the only place that tubes sound any better than good solid-state designs to me is in performance amps. (They might sound better to me in home stereo, except that i can’t imagine driving anything in the home hard enough to reach the part of the curve where it actually makes a difference.)

In general (as with taste tests of USAian beers), in well-designed double-blind testing, even the people who claim to have the best ears generally cannot consistently identify one over the other.

But, when they can “see the labels”, they pretty consistently choose the one with the most intense propaganda in its favour.

This is why Budweiser and Monster Cable are so popular…

(USA brewers spend hundreds of millions making sure that all USAian beers taste pretty much the same – like love in a canoe – and then spend billions trying to convince the public that theirs is better.)

Without getting into the partisan rhetoric employed by either side, there is one obvious thing affecting the sound in tube amps that’s usually absent in solid state equipment: output transformers. Regardless of the care taken in design and construction, a transformer’s distinguishing characteristic is a tendency to resist changes in current, thus ’rounding off’ waves… some solid state equipment also has output transformers, and the sound is similar, if not quite identical. Close, though.

Actually, a lot of the best amp designs (that i’ve seen) don’t use amps.

What gives tube amps that “warm sound” is the introduction of harmonics when the amp is driven hard.

Since tubes go into saturation/cutoff gradually, they produce both even and odd harmonics. Solid state devices have a very sharp characteristic curve in those regions, and produce almost exclusively odd harmonics, which give a harsh edge to the sound.

Ooh, good point! You can see I don’t get out in the fresh air often 🙂 …well, and I’m tired. But when not driven hard, the transformer presence or absence seems to make the most difference to my ear when we’re a/b testing.

Main problem with those types of designs is that you can blow a final awful easily if you get too low an impedance (or a spike, sometimes)…

I had a really good amp; one day i accidentally dropped the tone arm and the spike that caused blew a final. (This was about 1973.) I was able to buy a new final and install it myself – the transistor cost about $10 at 1973 prices.

I’m inclined to agree with you. Given the irregular and inconsistent line count, that speech balloon has more in common with Kryptos than with binary code. I also had a crack at it in an “ahrteest”-ic fashion, but with inconclusive results.